Informatics Professor Crista Lopes has been named an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to ubiquitous and immersive programming. “I am extremely honored for having received this recognition,” says Lopes. IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose “extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.”

Lopes pioneered the concept of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) and was an early contributor to AspectJ, an AOP extension to Java. Her book, Exercises in Programming Style, describes 33 different styles of writing the same program and is rapidly becoming a classic in programming circles. It was chosen as “Best in Computing Notable Book” by ACM Computing Reviews in 2014.

In her role as an open source developer, Lopes is one of the main architects of the OpenSimulator immersive virtual world platform. She designed and implemented a federation architecture for virtual worlds that supports tens of thousands of OpenSimulator users around the world. She has spearheaded the OpenSimulator Community Conference, an annual, purely virtual conference that has been bringing together users of OpenSimulator since 2013. Her contributions to OpenSimulator earned her the Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest in 2016.

IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 plus members in 160 countries, the association is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.

— Shani Murray